In a nominal predicate, the lexical and grammatical content are split in two (or more) parts. Usually, it's admitted that the verbal part (copula or light verb) bears grammatical sense and the nominal part (noun or adjective) the lexical one. However, the analysis we expose for Italian noun predicates shows that the distribution of grammatical categories is much less localized that it seems. Only tense and gender of noun are well localized categories; the others depend on various factors, including the nature of light verb, the nature and the number of predicative noun, various prepositions and articles introducing nominal part or its arguments, aspectual class of the predicate and nature of its complements.